Shirley Serious
Amarr
The Khanid Sisters of Athra
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Posted - 2010.04.07 20:22:00 -
[1]
Arguments about profitability are pointless. They never go anywhere, and miss the point.
The existence of people who sell items below the price that they would have received if they just sold the materials they used to build the items instead of building it, and people who don't care what the costs are, because they need the items right then, all mean that profitability is not the issue.
The only arguments that matter, are ones about the need for interaction between players and the amount of man-hours that are spent doing things.
Invention requires lots of datacores and bpcs. Obtaining those datacores and bpcs, and getting them to where they need to be requires co-operation between players (or alts, heheh). All the limits of datacores per character, number of research slots per character, etc. It is quite fiddly, and uses a lot of man hours.
BPOs do not require those things. The number of players/alts required to produce an item is less. It is simpler, and uses less man hours.
On the scale of large alliances, BPOs don't matter much, because of the volumes. Invention can put out a lot more than bpos can.
On smaller scales, it can make a difference.
There are a few corps in existence, with BPOs, which are sufficient to meet their corp needs for those things. If they did not have a BPO, then they would need to go outside the corp to have a supply of those things, as collectively, they would not have enough agents or science/industry slots.
The BPOs also allow their science/industry slots to be used on other things, like T3 stuff. Opportunity cost and whatnot.
I'm sure someone could do the maths to compare the number of characters needed to match the production rate of a single ship BPO.
E.g. a Zealot.
Organisation A has a Zealot BPO. One character uses one manufacturing slot to build from it.
Organisation B invents their Zealots. How many characters and science/industry slots will they use to match A?
Those things about BPOs are what matters. Profitability does not matter at all.
Yes.
Yes, I am. |